In the field of anatomic pathology, a piece of human tissue is typically inspected and analyzed by staining the tissue with a substance that reveals the presence of material of diagnostic significance. The stained tissue sample is then viewed on a slide under a microscope. Imaging systems exist that display an image and allow the user to view and draw the region that is of interest using graphics tools, and to subsequently collect and store the image.
A challenge relating to microscopy for anatomic pathology is data acquisition and storage using a scanning instrument, such as a digital camera in combination with a computer-controlled microscope. The microscope takes photographic images of a specimen in the microscopic field of view. Once the image is captured, a quantitative analysis by image-processing techniques is performed on tissue types having various architectural features. Typically, for each slide, 100 to 400 tissue images are collected at 40× magnification. Consequently, a digital representation of an entire microscope slide at high power requires considerable computer storage space.
The current standard for storing large quantities of scanned image data is to use a single large file of a standard graphical format. The common graphical file formats used are named according to the type of compression employed by the standard. There are several compression standards, common examples of which include JPEG, MPEG, GIF, TIFF, PICT, and ZIP. Currently no standard file formats allow for the lossless compression of images in a non-rectangular data structure. In addition, these formats provide no correlation of image data with real-world coordinates of the actual physical object that has been scanned, as would be useful in microscopy for anatomic pathology.
Therefore, it would be desirable to achieve improvements in image data compression techniques and improvements to image data storage architectures and methods are to fulfill the data storage requirements of organic and other amorphous structures and to reduce the data acquisition time associated with these high-power images.